How Infinera Turned Thinking about Optics on its Head

A Q&A with Jagdeep Singh

When and how did Infinera get started?
Singh: “We started after the telecom bubble had already burst in 2001. So we were raising capital at a time when capital had dried up. We were selling to a market that many investors didn’t believe existed any more, which is the telecom carrier market. And, to top it all off, we were proposing taking on a technology, the photonic integrated circuit, that had never been done before and was in many ways the holy grail of the optical industry and there was huge technology risk.

“We were off the charts in terms of risk, so it’s a miracle we ever got funding at all. I think what happened was that investors saw the vision of the story. We were pretty upfront about the risk, and we said ‘Look, we don’t know if we can do this, but if we do do it we can turn this industry upside down and really change the game in a fundamental way.’ ”

What were you doing that was so disruptive?
Singh: “Two things. One is we were proposing to build this photonic integrated circuit, which again the vision has been a holy grail for the industry for well over 20 years.

“When we started the company the optical industry was moving toward this vision of what was known as the all-optical network. The fundamental issue was that converting between optics and electronics – or the O-E-O conversion – was expensive. And so the entire issue tried to move toward a vision in which it basically thought that, given the O-E-O was expensive, the right direction was to eliminate the O-E-O from the network.

“But the all-optical vision resulted in an all-analog vision, so the carrier then no longer has the ability to process the data, the signals that are passing through their network. They can transmit the waveform, but they can’t look at the bits that make up the waveform, and they can’t add or drop, or switch, or mux, or groom, or do anything useful. And that, of course, affects the ability to build a flexible, reliable, scalable network, which is the business that they’re in as a carrier.

“So in some ways this all-optical paradigm tried to reduce the costs at the initial startup time, but the way it got there is by getting rid of all the functionality carriers needed to run the networks. And so, as a result, that approach didn’t take off, because it was kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water, as they say.”

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